What were the major tools in building a railroad in the 1860s?

Question

What specific jobs would mules and horses do? Besides transportation.

Answer 1

move rock and dirt

Answer 2

That's what mules do, transportation.

In building RR's they would have been in harness and pulling wagons, scrapers, dirt movers, etc.

In the northeast most of the labor would have been European labor, Italians and Irish mostly.

The major tools were of course, pick, shovel, wheelbarrows and dynamite.

Answer 3

The major tools were the Irish, the Chinese and the Italians, whether in the northeast or on the first transcontinental railroad project brought to you by them with the addition of Abraham Lincoln's signature on the Pacific Railway Act.

Mule trains were expensive.  Labor wasn't.  

Life was cheaper than both........

Answer 4

Chinese labor was a major part of the building, especially in the west.  Most of the heavy stuff was done with rail cars, engines, spike malls chains and human muscle.

Horses and mules would have been used to pull cut lumber out of the way and to pull sleds of cross ties.  

Dynamite played a key role.  Mountain passes were blasted out of the way.  The rock was used for balast to build foundations for the track.  Dynamite would also have been used to blast tree stumps out of the way.  

It was also used as a great motivator when chinese labor threatened to quit working while tunneling through the Rocky mountains.  Many of the railroad executives advocated packing dynamite into tunnels (which is where the work force was living at the time) and blasting the rock in to kill them all for threatening a work stoppage because of pay disputes.

Answer 5

horses and mules pulled the wagons,the chinese provided the man power,lots of picks,shovels,leverage bars,and the special hammers to drive the spikes..and the worst tool of all the lawyers to chase the people off there land